Ronan Bennett was spot-on in his denunciation of Martin Amis's racist remarks about Muslims, in Monday's Guardian, and (not for the first time) Christopher Hitchens is way off beam in coming to Amis's defence.

"To accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another," Hitchens claims. But this is exactly what Amis does when he refers en bloc to "Muslims" - and it is exactly what Hitchens does too when he defines "Muslims" as "ululating praise for suicide" and so on.

Of course, he is right when he suggests that Muslims aren't "a race" - any more than Jews or Sikhs are. But hate-speech directed at Jews and Sikhs (for instance) is a criminal offence under race legislation, even though they aren't races in any genetic sense, whereas hate-speech against Muslims is not covered. That is presumably why Hitchens and Amis feel they can get away with it.

But hate-speech and acts are alive and thriving on the streets of Britain today and on the websites of overtly racist parties, and overt or covert Islamophobia has largely replaced anti-semitism in the press and around otherwise polite dinner tables. I share Hitchens' hatred of fundamentalist religion, but hate-speech of the sort that pervades his and Amis's musings finds its way into action among those who work with knives and firebombs rather than computer keyboards.

And as for Hitchens' claim that it is "fantasy" to suggest that "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation" are called anti-semites, I don't know what world he is living in. I'll be only too willing to send him a collage of the hate emails that the Israel lobby spews onto me - and anyone else who dares to raise their heads above the parapet to describe the Israeli occupation as, in Desmond Tutu's words, "like apartheid", or call for action in defence of the Palestinians. They don't make pleasant reading.